Technical Field
The present disclosure generally relates to systems and methods for providing services, and more particularly to systems and methods for providing access to information technology assets in an open access environment.
Background
The financial services industry continues to grow as networking and client-server technologies advance. Financial service providers, such as banks, continue to leverage the capabilities of the Internet, mobile computing, and the like, to provide services to its customers. To provide such services, financial service providers may develop hardware and software platforms that function as the backbone of such offerings. Conventional approaches include developing customized information technology (IT) services, databases, data structures, scripts, and models geared toward delivering the functionalities intended to support services for end-customers.
But these approaches had drawbacks. For example, IT approaches that relied on monolithic and vertically integrated mainframe systems became too complex and customized. Distributing operational management across many nodes increased costs, resulted in frequent business outages. And, where project delivery took precedence over IT, software patches overwhelmed the integrity of the core systems, resulting in even more complex IT offerings that camouflaged the core engines that were introduced. Consequently, many conventional IT approaches result in too many one-off tools and functionalities that are not portable across other platforms, services, or business units of an enterprise. New tools, infrastructures, and/or software may have to be developed and implemented each time a new service is envisioned. Further, access to IT resources that support such services may be limited and were incapable of being shared internally and externally to a financial service provider's enterprise. And because financial service providers may lack the resources to keep up with ever-changing technologies and capabilities, they may be forced to rely on outside sources, such as vendors, to develop, maintain, and/or host the IT backbone that support service offerings.